Moderator Lily Herman investigated the allure of crime stories for creators and readers at a Saturday morning panel at New York Comic Con 2022: “Criminal Compulsions: The Appeal of Crime Fiction.” The panelists were novelists Sweeney Boo (Over My Dead Body), Jake Burt (Ghoul of Windydown Vale), Fabian Nicieza (The Self-Made Widow), Alex Segura (Secret Identity), Claudia Gray (The Murder of Mr. Wickham) and Dana Schwartz (Anatomy: A Love Story).
.
All the panelists were driven by a compulsion to create their stories but the direction of those stories entirely depended on what fascinated each person.
The panel began with a question about their ‘origin’ stories. Each started with a germ of an idea that sometimes took years to form into a story.
Schwartz said the idea for Anatomy: A Love Story began when she was 22 and backpacking across Europe. “I became obsessed with Edinburgh,” she said. That interest eventually became this story, which is set in 1832. It features a woman who longs to become a surgeon but she’s stopped by two things. One, her gender, and two, the fact that she cannot find any way to practice or hone her skills. This eventually leads her to the Resurrection Men, who existed in real life, and, naturally, a murder to solve.
Gray, who many know from her Star Wars tie-in books, said was a fervent reader of P.D. James and Jane Austen, and eagerly awaited James’ Death Comes to Pemberley but was disappointed in the mystery’s conclusion. “I have learned that when you can’t get over a creative choice in a story, that’s your creative self knocking. That means you have to tell that story that the author did not.” That became a series with The Murder of Mr. Wickham as the first book.
Nicieza said he sat on his story for almost two decades. It began in 1995 when he and his neighbors lost a fight against a local gun club that sometimes sent stray bullets into their houses. “I wrote the book for revenge against the white townies.” That became Suburban Dicks, the first in his series.
Burt was fascinated by a minor character in Jaws, the boy who seems out into the ocean wearing a fin to pretend to be a shark. “I thought, what would possess a kid to pull a prank like that? I eventually felt that he decided there was something so dangerous out there that he had to teach them to avoid it.” And that boy with that idea became the main character of The Ghoul of Windytown Vale.
Segura, who like Nicieza, has long been involved in many facets of superhero comics, said he studied the history of comics and was also fascinated by how mysteries can take you to another world. All this became Secret Identity, in which the protagonist works for a failing comic book superhero company in 1970s New York City.
Sweeney Boo’s origin was eye-opening, as she grew up in a retirement home where her mother worked. This meant she was far more familiar with death than the average child. She became intrigued by what would push someone to do something bad? But then she added a magical setting for Over My Dead Body.
The main commonality is each author possessed a deep interest in an idea or place or concept that worked its way into their brains until they finally came out as a book. However, for most of them, the idea was only the beginning. Making it come to life necessitated intense research into the setting of their stories.
Nicieza joked that his research for Suburban Dicks was “I walked down my driveway, picked up my newspaper, and went back inside.” He specifically wanted nothing about the superhero genre in his story. The characters were drawn from a very specific and familiar time in his life.
For the others, it took a little bit more effort.
Boo researched for something appropriate spooky and finally decided on an old school that contains all kinds of secrets. Burt said since he decided to set his story in a swamp, he became immersed in mud. “There were hours of videos of things sinking into the mud.”
Schwartz already hosts a history podcast, so the research end was familiar, but what she also wanted to convey in the story was the vibe, the mood, the aesthetic. She spent several weeks in Edinburgh and also eventually read a full shelf of books by 19th-century surgeons. Segura said he thought the 1970s research would be “easy” but said it turned out to be the most journalistic thing he’d ever done. He even interviewed comic veterans of the era, including Paul Levitz.
Gray said she had a head start, in working with characters that already existed, and being already an Austen nerd. But the details of the time period had to be researched and they weren’t always in agreement. “Would a woman do this then?” The answers were both yes and no. “In the end, you choose something plausible and go with it.”
All said their worldbuilding absolutely informed their characters, giving them fuller form. Gray said one of her detectives, Jonathan Darcy, the son of Elizabeth and Lord Darcy, is intensely interested in the details of his life, which led her to explore why, and she realized he was not neuro-typical, and that the strict routines of the domestic life of the time period are what helped him cope. That’s why he’s so frustrated when the rules aren’t followed but it’s also why he notices when something is even slightly off.
Segura wrote a protagonist who, like him, is Cuban-American (as is the protagonist of his Pete Fernandez mysteries) to tell the story from a point of view that has often been missing from noir stories. He also wanted to explore the idea of fandom.
Schwartz said she had to work hard to make certain her protagonist was simply a modern-style woman set down in a historical setting. “My pet peeve with historical fiction is when the characters feel modern and not part of their time.” Hazel is a woman with incredible amounts of privilege but, at the same time, a great amount of free time. “She has the wealth and power to think she can do it and the freedom to do it.”
Burt said he was lucky to write middle-grade books because that means his hero, Copper is the perfect age to investigate. No group is more interested in who has the power than teenagers, he said. “There are no people better primed to ask questions than tweens.”
For Boo, this was her first time writing rather than drawing a book. She explored the idea of a random crime that happens around a normal person, not a chosen one, not someone destined to be a hero. She did base the familiar in the book on her cat who, she says, is a most anxious little cat.
The panel ended with the writers giving advice to those who want to follow in their footsteps. Gray said to learn who you are as a writer, though she advised anyone opposed to outlines perhaps reconsider when plotting a mystery. Burt said to start with the basic conflict of a character who wants something and a character who stands in the way of that. Schwartz was not joking when she suggested giving a close friend to change all social media passwords on your accounts and make sure they don’t give them back until the book is finished.
Continued belowBoo pointed out that it’s never going to be perfect. That even the fifth draft might not be good. “Make the best of it and you’re always going to learn.”
Segura summed up the theme of the panel when he told the audience to write the story that you want to exist, advice that all the panelists had clearly followed.
You can find all these books available at bookstores, at your shopping method of choice. I’ve reviewed Secret Identity and can highly recommend it. I’m looking forward to the rest.
